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La Figlia Che Piange
O quam te memorem virgo ...
Stand on the highest pavement of the stair
Lean on a garden urn
Weave, weave the sunlight in your hair
Clasp your flowers to you with a pained surprise
Fling them to the ground and turn
With a fugitive resentment in your eyes:
But weave, weave the sunlight in your hair.
So I would have had him leave,
So I would have had her stand and grieve,
So he would have left
As the soul leaves the body torn and bruised,
As the mind deserts the body it has used.
I should find
Some way incomparably light and deft,
Some way we both should understand,
Simple and faithless as a smile and shake of the hand.
She turned away, but with the autumn weather
Compelled my imagination many days,
Many days and many hours:
Her hair over her arms and her arms full of flowers.
And I wonder how they should have been together!
I should have lost a gesture and a pose.
Sometimes these cogitations still amaze
The troubled midnight and the noon’s repose.
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| La Figlia Che Piange |
Summary and Analysis
Introduction: La Figlia Che Piange (1916) included in the collection Prufrock has an epigraph from Virgil's Aeneid recalling the encounter of Aeneas and Venus. Venus, disguised as a maiden, asks Aeneas: "Have you seena sister of mine?" Aeneas replies: "Omaiden, how may I name thee? This epitomizes the poem's problem of emotional recollection. The title of the poem means "The Girl who Weeps.
Summary: In the first section we have the recreation of a vision involving beauty and pain. The note of cynicism marked by "fugitive", emerges clearly in the second section, as the emotional values of the parting are defined. As he remembers it now, it resembled the separation of soul from body; grief is reserved for her and relief for him, just as the body is left torn and bruised, while the soul is freed. Then disillusion finds the "way incomparably light and deft", which unites them both in cynical understanding. In the last section the bare reality is recorded" she turned away". She did not behave as at first described, with romantic exaggeration.. Yet he continues to be troubled by the beauty and the pain of the vision.
Critical Appreciation: The mixture of moods in the poem is subtly and effectively integrated. In the vision of the weeping girl, the cynical mood cannot wipe out the former emotion or dispel the flavour of the experience. The vision of beauty involving pain that is subsequently qualified by disillusion reappears in the imagery which symbolizes mingled longing and frustration in Eliot's later poems. The poem's lyrical quality and Eliot's technical skill shown in it make it a popular poem. However, the poem shows the influence of Laforgue in its essence of evasiveness. The relation between the narrator and the male lover in the poem is quite ambiguous, and one is never sure of the objective pattern of the events. The thematic affinity with Prufrock is close.